Introduction

This is a blog I've set up to document the week I spent on the U.S.-Mexican border in August 2009, as a volunteer with No More Deaths, a humanitarian aide group that provides services to migrants who are crossing the border through the Sonoran desert in Arizona. To start off, this is not a normal blog. I was camping in the desert the week I was there, so I didn't have access to a toilet, much less the internet. This blog is basically a transcript of the journal I kept while I was there, with a little editing and linkage thrown in later on. Because I wanted this to be read from beginning to end, I've messed with the dates on here so that the oldest entry appears at the top, and the newest one at the end. On the posts you will see a bunch of weird numbers that say something like "20091224". Ignore these. The real dates appear in the title of each post.

This isn't a blog I plan to continue updating, it's just to share my experience from my trip. I might add another post of two if something comes up that's relevant, but for the most part the bulk of the blog is right here. If you want to read my regular blog, it's linked to the right, but it's not incredibly interesting and I update it very, very rarely. Maybe someday I'll be a good blogger, but I haven't so far.

Since this blog is basically just a transcript of my journal, it relies heavily on my own experiences. There's some pontificating about broader issues going on, but I may have skipped over some deeper analysis or history of the situation. If you have any questions, please leave them as a comment and I'd be happy to have a dialogue with you or point you to some other reading. I've also included some links to the right of some other great websites you can check out.

But just to give a brief overview of what the hell caused me to pick up and go to the desert in Southern Arizona in August: Since the mid-1990s, U.S. immigration policy has been pushing undocumented migrants crossing over to the U.S. further away from the cities and safer areas to cross, and more and more into difficult and dangerous terrain in the desert. Officials have openly stated that they are using "death as a deterrent" to people crossing the border illegally. Every year, hundreds of bodies are found of people who died trying to cross the border from Mexico. Hundreds or thousands more are probably never found. No More Deaths was created several years ago by activists of conscience and people of faith who realized death should never be the penalty for someone trying to find a better life. They maintain a desert aide camp for about 8 months of the year, staffed primarily by volunteers, some from Arizona, and many others from all over the country. They provide water, food, and medical attention for people hiking the desert trails that lead up from Mexico. For more information about No More Deaths, visit their website at www.nomoredeaths.org.

Friday 8.21.09: somewhere in Southern California

...or at least further South than I'm used to. The landscape is brown grass, or is it dirt? Brown hills, some kind of green crops growing to the left, some trees shading cars and farm equipment to the right. Wendy just said the thermostat is reading 102 outside, but in the car it's cool, air conditioned and comfortable.

We left at about 10 this morning. I packed my duffel bag and sleeping bag into the roof bag on my friend's car, which they had altered to say "Poof Fag" on the back. Last night was surreal. My normal weekday work exhaustion, brain full of self-preoccupying thoughts, body seeming to expect me to get up and go to work today.

I've been reading The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, a horrifying account of a bunch of men who died near the area I'm going to. Yesterday on the bus I got to the section that describes death by heat stroke. Each stage, in great detail.

Your blood is as low as it can get. Dehydration has reduced all your inner streams to sluggish mudholes. Your heart pumps harder and harder to get fluid and oxygen to your organs. Empty vessels within you collapse. Your sweat runs out.

With no sweat, your body's swamp-coolor breaks. The thermostat goes haywire. You are having a core meltdown.

Your temperature redlines--you hit 105, 106, 108 degrees. Your body panics and dilates all blood capillaries near the surface, hoping to flood your skin with blood to cool it off. You blush. Your eyes turn red: blood vessels burst, and later, the tissue of the whites literally cooks until it goes pink, then a well-done crimson.

Your skin gets terribly sensitive. It hurts, it burns. Your nerves flame. Your blood heats under your skin. Clothing feels like sandpaper.

Some walkers at this point strip nude. Originally, BORSTAR rescuers thought this stripping was a delirious panic, an attempt to cool off at the last minute. But often, the clothing was eerily neat, carefully folded and left in nice little piles beside the corpses. They realized that walkers couldn't stand their nerve-endings being chafed by their clothes. The walkers stripped to get free of the irritation.

Once they're naked, they're surely hallucinating. They dig burrows in the soil, apparently thinking they'll escape the sun. Once underground, of course, they bake like a pig at a luau. Some dive into sand, thinking it's water, and they swim in it until they pass out. They choke to death, their throats filled with rocks and dirt. Cutters can only assume they think they're drinking water.

Your muscles, lacking water, feed on themselves. They break down and start to rot. Once rotting in you, they dump rafts of dying cells into your already sludgy bloodstream.

Proteins are peeling off your dying muscles. Chunks of cooked meat are falling out of your organs, to clog your other organs. The system closes down in a series. your kidneys, your bladder, your heart. They jam shut. Stop. Your brain sparks. Out. You're gone.

I don't know what I'm getting into.